Vanessa Vega's Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light: A Memoir of Cutting, Healing, and Hope is a first-person account of the road through self-injury and disordered eating to recovery. It weaves details of Vega's life with accounts of individual and group therapy sessions. Many important themes emerge for examination, all of which shed light on what it means to be driven to self-harm.
From Self-Injury to Self-Revelation
Vega's most astute contribution in Comes the Darkness is her ability to capture the way a person who self-harms (and who has an eating disorder) sees herself. When a person views herself as worthless and yet demands that she be perfect, life -- and recovery -- are that much more difficult. Yet that is the task Vega and others in her position have faced.
I wonder what it must be like to chart your own recovery, to write a book about coming to terms with imperfection, when writing itself tends to demand perfection. A sign of her healing is Vega's willingness to use her skills in the open, subjecting them to comments from random sources like this reviewer.
As the details of her life and worldview emerge through accounts of therapy sessions, the picture of Vega's life and ways of coping with it slowly coalesce. She captures many internal contradictions -- for example, how a person can be both full of pride and self-loathing at the same time. She makes clear the process of emotional release that occurs in cutting when stress becomes too great.
Also, Vega presents the confrontations provided by her therapist that left her in uncomfortable, and very healing, positions. As a therapist, it was fascinating to see how another clinician might approach a situation like this one. In therapy, Vega finds herself surprised about how she has contributed to her own circumstances, and how she has taken responsibility that is not hers.
The Inner Struggle Against Beauty in Cutting and Eating Disorders
I was struck (as I usually am in these cases) with Vega's flight from her own beauty -- how what was powerful and good in her was discounted in her thoughts, while the darkness she felt was given a position of prominence. When a person who harms herself or who has an eating disorder is met with undeniable evidence of beauty, grace, strength, or any other positive attribute, she will often resist it. It's like turning on a thousand-watt light in a pitch-dark room: Covering up feels natural and necessary.
In essence, the pain of cutting provides relief, while things that would normally be seen as relieving are painful to her.
In Vega's case, there were two prominent internal voices that felt like her own. One told her that she was a failure and needed to cut herself as penance. The other was "very nurturing and trustworthy," saying only "positive and encouraging things." It is a constant battle that the negative voice usually wins. Says Vega: "Because the negative voices are louder and usually make more sense, I give them the power." [emphasis mine]
Eventually, though, Vega's positive voices began to make more sense as they were reinforced by her counselor and those in her therapy group. It often takes many voices telling the truth to overcome the vicious words that keep us in bondage.
Where I Wanted More
Readers of Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light may see a resemblance between the book's style and that of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. But Comes the Darkness is (perhaps thankfully) not as relentless and R-rated as Frey's. Instead, it attempts to interweave a narrative background for the here-and-now conversations between Vega and her therapist and therapy group members. If you prefer masochistic reading, dig into Frey's fictionalized work. If you want a straightforward account of the struggle for recovery, Vega's effort will serve that purpose better.
But how do you recount in a book the depth of communication in therapy settings? It's not easy. The conversations Vega provides, and her answers to the therapist's questions in particular, include lots of content that we need to know to understand her progress. One gets the sense that Vega is squeezing information into these responses; someone with her level of resistance to treatment would seem to have been more tight-lipped.
The result is that the therapy accounts, while sacrificing no impact, feel a bit canned. But my suspicion is that a book that wouldn't feel "packaged" would have to be hundreds and hundreds of pages long and far more difficult to follow (even if the author didn't choose to write something like A Million Little Pieces). Vega's approach is the most appropriate for the widest audience, which is a noble goal.
What You'll Take Away
Some of the details in Comes the Darkness are disturbing, made all the more so because Vega's style is not over the top in general. From the methods of self-harm to the battle with food, from the brutality of her father to the violence experienced by friends, the avenues to pain emerge evenly and powerfully. The book slowly reveals the impact of eating disorders and self-harm, gently asking the reader not to look away.
It is a tribute to Vanessa Vega that her account is infused with gentleness. Kindness toward herself was one of the hardest things for Vega to grasp in recovery. Asking that readers view her life with care is a mark of healing and hope. This is perhaps the book's most lasting gift, because it is more than an account of issues that can be horrifying. It's a call to a greater level of compassion. Because Vega has learned more about compassion and forgiveness in her own life, the request she makes of readers feels honoring.
